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Comment by jefftk | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure which part of the post you're referring to when you say that FLoC isn't more private than the status quo; is it the "FLoC will expose your data. More than ever." section? That has "Now every website will get to see an ID that was generated from your behaviour on every other website", but this is not what Chrome has said:

"Websites can exclude a page from the FLoC calculation by setting a Permissions-Policy header interest-cohort=() for that page. For pages that haven't been excluded, a page visit will be included in the browser's FLoC calculation if document.interestCohort() is used on the page. During the current FLoC origin trial, a page will also be included in the calculation if Chrome detects that the page loads ads or ads-related resources." -- https://web.dev/floc/#do-websites-have-to-participate-and-sh...

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Suddenly the tracking includes all sites and pages. That is not an improvement. Having an opt out or even an opt in is not the solution here. We have all seen how that works.

The tracking just has to stop. Google can generate plenty of revenue without tracking us. They were in fact making plenty before they moved from context sensitive ads to surveillance-based ads.

Your statement below is both funny and misleading at the same time and I guess it is also why opt-in is often such a misleading term.

So you start with all pages that have ads, meaning most all pages that are tracked today. Then you add to that by "opt-in". Now, most sites are not built by hand. The tools they use may thus "opt-in" for them. Also, this method may make it harder to block the tracking, so you end up tracking more in practice, which is obviously why this is being introduced, as so many have chosen to use tracker blocking of some kind.

Your statement on "opt-in" really needs be reiterated. In many cases you are left with options like: do you want to use this product? Then you have to "opt-in". Great examples are Windows 10, that insists on you logging in with Microsoft. Similarly many products require you to "opt-in" to use them.

We need this to stop. Ban surveillance-based ads now!

> the tracking includes all sites and pages

But it doesn't! They are proposing, in the stable version, to include only pages that opt in by calling the FLoC API.

For the origin trial in particular, to avoid a chicken-and-egg issue, they are also including pages that have ads. Since ads today make extensive use of third-party cookies for cross-site tracking, This is still not anything like "all sites and pages".

(Still speaking only for myself)

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